The Dirty War is the name used by the military junta or civic-military dictatorship of Argentina for its period of state terrorism in Argentina from 1974 to 1983. During this campaign, military and security forces and death squads in the form of the Argentine Anticommunist Alliance hunted down any political dissidents and anyone believed to be associated with socialism, left-wing Peronism, or the Montoneros movement.
The People's Revolutionary Army was the military branch of the communist Workers' Revolutionary Party in Argentina.
Silvia Quintela was an Argentine doctor who became one of the best-known victims among "the disappeared" during the 1976–83 military dictatorship. Her case has gained recognition for the fact that at the time of her detention by the military junta, she and her husband Abel Madariaga, an agronomist, were expecting their first child. It is thought that Quintela was secretly allowed to give birth in custody and that the child was adopted while she was subsequently killed.
The Higher School of Mechanics of the Navy has gone through three major transformations throughout its history. Originally ESMA served as an educational facility of the Argentine Navy. The original ESMA was a complex located at 8151 Libertador Avenue, in the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires, in the barrio of Núñez. Additionally, It was the seat of U.T.3.3.2—Unidad de Tareas 2 of G.T.3.3 [es].
Banfield is a city in the district of Lomas de Zamora in Buenos Aires Province, Argentina, 14 km (9 mi) south of the city center of Buenos Aires. It forms part of the Greater Buenos Aires metro area.
Léonie Duquet was one of two French nuns who was arrested in December 1977 in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and "disappeared". She was believed killed by the military regime of Argentine President Jorge Rafael Videla during the Dirty War. Alice Domon, the other French nun working with Duquet, disappeared a few days later. They had been working in poor neighborhoods of Buenos Aires in the 1970s and supported the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, founded in 1977. Despite repeated efforts by France to trace the two nuns, the Argentine military dictatorship was unresponsive. In 1990 a French court in Paris tried Argentine Captain Alfredo Astiz, known to have arrested Duquet and believed implicated in the "disappearance" of Domon, for kidnapping the two sisters. He was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment in absentia. In Argentina at the time, he and other military and security officers were shielded from prosecution by Pardon Laws passed in 1986 and 1987. These were repealed in 2003 and ruled unconstitutional in 2005, and the government re-opened prosecution of war crimes.
National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons was an Argentine organization created by President Raúl Alfonsín on 15 December 1983, shortly after his inauguration, to investigate the fate of the desaparecidos and other human rights violations performed during the military dictatorship known as the National Reorganization Process between 1976 and 1983.
Miguel Osvaldo Etchecolatz was an Argentine police officer, who worked in the Buenos Aires Provincial Police during the first years of the military dictatorship of the 1970s, known as the National Reorganization Process, which Etchecolatz was deeply involved in. He was first convicted of crimes committed during this period in 1986; the full stop law, which passed that year and created amnesty for security officers, meant that he was released without a sentence. In 2003, Congress repealed the law and the government re-opened prosecution of crimes committed during the Dirty War.
The Night of the Pencils, was a series of kidnappings and forced disappearances, followed by the torture, rape, and murder of 10 high-school students that began on the evening of 16 September 1976 and continued into the next day, during Argentina's last civil-military dictatorship. The event is one of the most infamous acts of repression committed by the last Argentine military dictatorship, as most of the victims were under 18 years of age. Four of the victims survived; the remains of the others have never been found.
Jorge Julio López is an Argentine retired bricklayer who was kidnapped during the National Reorganization Process, and disappeared again during the democratic government of Néstor Kirchner after testifying in trial against dictatorship criminal Miguel Etchecolatz.
The history of human rights in Argentina is affected by the last civil-military dictatorship in the country (1976-1983) and its aftermath. The dictatorship is known in North America as the "Dirty War", a named coined by the dictatorship itself to justify their actions of State-sponsored terrorism against Argentine citizenry, which were backed by the United States as part of their planned Operation Condor, and carried out primarily by Jorge Rafael Videla's de facto rule (1976-1981), but also after it and until democracy was restored in 1983. However, the human rights situation in Argentina has improved significantly since the end of the dictatorship.
Enriqueta Estela Barnes de Carlotto is an Argentine human rights activist and president of the association of Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo. One of her daughters, Laura Estela Carlotto, was kidnapped and missing while pregnant in Buenos Aires, in late 1977. Through stories, she could ascertain that her daughter had given birth to a boy, and that her grandson was appropriated and his identity changed. She searched for him for nearly 36 years, until, on 5 August 2014, after a DNA check voluntarily made by the person concerned, her grandson was identified, and became the 114th in the list of recovered grandchildren.
Pilar Calveiro is an Argentine political scientist, a doctor of political science residing in Mexico. She was exiled to that country after having been kidnapped at the Navy Petty-Officers School of Mechanics (ESMA) during the military dictatorship of the 1970s. In her writing she has made important contributions to the analysis of biopower and political violence, as well as recent history and the memory of Argentine repression. Her work has been published in Mexico, Argentina, and France, and she is currently a research professor at the Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla. Her publications include Poder y desaparición, los campos de concentración en Argentina and Desapariciones, memoria y desmemoria de los campos de desaparición argentinos.
El Olimpo was a clandestine detention center in Buenos Aires and used during the Dirty War in Argentina. Although it operated for only five months, from August 1978 to January 1979, about 700 people were illegally detained there, of whom only 50 survived. Jorge Fontevecchia, founder of the newspaper Editorial Perfil, was detained there.
María Eugenia Ponce de Bianco was an Argentine social activist. She was one of the founders of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, an organization which searched for desaparecidos. She was kidnapped, tortured, and murdered as a result of her involvement with the group.
María Isabel Chicha Chorobik de Mariani, was an Argentine human rights activist. She was founder and second president of the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo.
María Emilia Islas Gatti was a Uruguayan political activist and anarchist, who disappeared in Buenos Aires in 1976.
Eduardo Héctor Garat Cabanillas was an Argentine lawyer and notary and a Montoneros militant.
The clandestine detention, torture and extermination centers, also called, were secret facilities used by the Armed, Security and Police Forces of Argentina to torture, interrogate, rape, illegally detain and murder people. The first ones were installed in 1975, during the constitutional government of María Estela Martínez de Perón. Their number and use became generalized after the coup d'état of March 24, 1976, when the National Reorganization Process took power, to execute the systematic plan of enforced disappearance of people within the framework of State terrorism. With the fall of the dictatorship and the assumption of the democratic government of Raúl Alfonsín on December 10, 1983, the CCDs ceased to function, although there is evidence that some of them continued to operate during the first months of 1984.
Disappeared Detainees is the term commonly used in Latin American countries to refer to the victims of kidnappings, usually taken to clandestine detention and torture centers, and crimes of forced disappearance, committed by various authoritarian military dictatorships during the 1970s and 1980s, and officially recognized, among others, by the governments of Argentina (1984) and Chile (1991).
